


the nerve to doubt her

by deadly_poison



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: ASPR spoilers, Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/F, Greg Knows AU, One Shot, Slavery, Speculation, Suicidal Thoughts, who am i kidding everybody has been spoiled already
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 09:24:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14668113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadly_poison/pseuds/deadly_poison
Summary: Greg makes Pearl cry.





	the nerve to doubt her

**Author's Note:**

> Consent violation is discussed in this fic, just be warned (although it's not physical rape, so I didn't know what to put in the tags)...

Rose was pregnant. She had announced the news to them while they were all sitting in the temple. She’d probably expected them to be happy for her.  
Garnet had known it already. She’d had more time to accept it. She wasn’t happy, but she was calm.  
Amethyst hadn’t accepted it. Surely, she had misunderstood and it wasn’t too late to have Rose change her mind? She wouldn’t just have abandoned them, her only family, in order to become a human, right?  
Pearl knew Amethyst was wrong. Leaving by becoming an entirely different being was exactly Rose’s style. Pearl felt stupid. She never thought Rose would do it to them, too, but now that she had? Honestly, she should have seen it coming.  
She didn’t try to argue with her about it: there was no convincing Rose once she’d made up her mind. So she numbly sat there while she spoke.  
When Rose was done, she hid, waiting for her feelings to catch up to her.

“What was she thinking! She can’t have a baby!” Pearl sobbed, hidden behind the hand-statue on the beach. She didn’t care about who could hear her. No, she _wanted_ someone to hear her.  
Rose found her soon afterwards.  
Pearl greeted her with a half-choked “Rose!”  
“My Pearl,” Rose answered with a sad smile. “What’s wrong?” she asked, lowering herself to look her in the eye.  
Oh Rose, as oblivious as always.  
“You’re leaving! Forever!” she threw herself in Rose’s arms. Rose caught her, as steady as always. Then, she started caressing her, one of her arms was more than enough to keep Pearl close to her chest. The desperate, shivering Gem continued to violently cry in her hug.  
“It’s going to be okay, Pearl.” She sounded as if she believed it. Pearl wanted to believe it too. “This way, it’ll be better for everyone. It’ll be better for you, too.”  
Pearl pulled away from her, jumping up. She forcefully shook her head, almost losing balance in the process.  
“I can’t- I can’t…” The words just wouldn’t come out. “I can’t go on living knowing I’ll never talk to you again. Knowing you’ll be gone forever.” Just saying that sentence made everything seem more real.  
“Pearl!” Rose gasped. “You don’t really mean it, do you? You’ve gotten through worse things.”  
Pearl moved further away from her. She had survived worse things, because Rose had been there. Because she knew, no matter how bad things got, Rose would always be there afterwards. But living in a universe without Rose? It scarcely bore thinking about.  
“Oh, Pearl… I hoped you’d be happy for me.” Rose’s voice was full of regret.  
“Please don’t go.” She reached towards Rose and grabbed a fold of her gown, as if that would have been enough to keep her there forever.  
“Pearl, I already made up my mind. I really want to do this. I will go through with this.”  
Pearl knew that. Tears were still running down her cheeks.  
“Please, prom-” Rose stopped. “It would break my heart if you stopped living your life just because of me.”  
“I can’t promise you that. I can’t do it,” she whispered.  
She wasn’t sure she wanted Rose to hear that. She needed to at least be able to consider a way out before she could choose to stay. She knew Rose could have taken that away in a few seconds. Some part of her believed that Rose wouldn’t do that, but then, what about that time… She looked up.  
Rose was crying too, now.  
“Yes, you can do it, I believe in you. You’re strong. You’re the strongest Gem I’ve ever met. You’ll survive this. Garnet and Amethyst will help you through this, and everything that will happen afterwards.”  
Rose thought so highly of her. Pearl didn’t think she deserved that. How had she somehow tricked this beautiful, exceptional Gem into overestimating her so much?  
“Oh Pearl, you’ll see, this child will be wonderful and beautiful,” Rose continued, dreamy. “A tiny human being, unique in every aspect of themselves. I bet you’ll come to love them, too.”  
Pearl really couldn’t see herself caring for or loving a human. She’d never found them cute, unlike Rose.  
“You don’t really know what your kid will be like, they-” Pearl abruptly stopped. Her bare-bones knowledge of human genetics resurfaced in her mind. “What will they look like, Rose?”  
“I don’t know! Isn’t it so exciting? I wish I could meet them!” Rose was ready to go on about this topic for days, but they didn’t have time for that right now. Pearl shook her head.  
“That’s not what I mean. Who will they take after, Rose?” Pearl hoped she’d get it, she had no way to be more explicit than this.  
“Mostly Greg, I hope! But maybe they’ll even look a little bit like me and -” Rose chirped. Then, the realization dawned on her. Her face frozen, she turned fully towards Pearl.  
Her hands were already on her mouth. ‘Which you?’ Pearl had thought about saying. That had been enough.  
Rose tore her gaze away from her. She didn’t like to be reminded of the past.  
And Pearl hated, hated that that last command made her resent her Diamond so much, that a thing that had been so normal for her to do felt so wrong. It made her jealous of Garnet’s, Amethyst’s and Rose’s complete freedom.  
Rose sighed. She still avoided looking at her. “I didn’t think all of this through.”

______________________ Present Day

Greg had just stepped inside Steven's house. He closed the front door.  
“What do you need to tell me? You sounded so serious on the phone earlier,” Greg said.  
“Dad, _we_ need to tell you something. Something important.” Pearl was standing right next to him. It had been her idea: Greg deserved to know, too. Now, after Sapphire had calmed down and Garnet was together again, they could finally tell him who Rose used to be. “Please sit down.”  
Greg settled on the couch. “I’m all ears, Steven.”  
Pearl felt bad about doing this, but she’d come to like Greg. It wasn’t right that he didn’t know.  
“Mom… wasn’t the Gem we all thought she was.” Steven took a deep breath. “I’m going to start from the beginning… See, her name wasn’t even Rose Quartz. It was-“  
“Pink Diamond.” Greg said, nodding, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “She changed her name, like I did.”  
Steven’s eyes widened. Pearl felt her legs about to give out from beneath her. No, no, this couldn’t be possible-  
“You knew!?” Steven shouted.  
“Well, she wanted me to know that what I saw was not her real body… in case the baby looked too much like her,” Greg continued, “the ‘her’ she used to be. I promised her not to tell any of you, unless, of course, you had Pink Diamond's eyes or something like that.”  
“She TOLD _you_?” Pearl finally cried. “How could she be sure you wouldn’t betray her, you’re not h-“ she was forcibly interrupted by her own hands. She just stood there, struggling, shivering.  
Greg shot a confused look at her. He hesitated. “She said she told me because she trusted me,” he said those last words very quickly, gesturing for Pearl to wait, “of course, she trusted you too, but-“  
“Not enough. Not in the same way.” Pearl’s words were barely audible. She could feel her lips tremble. Her skin felt as if it was about to catch on fire. Steven was yelling something at Greg, he was angry the truth had been kept from him again, but she couldn’t understand most of the words he was saying. She couldn’t focus. Her head was spinning. A big sob escaped her mouth.  
‘I can’t stay here with him,’ she thought. She stood up, steadied herself and a second later she ran towards the warp pad.

No matter where she went, she was reminded of Rose. She looked everywhere, trying to find some peace, but they’d lived together on this planet for millennia. Now, those places where they’d been happy together, those beautiful memories, were tainted by betrayal and mistrust.  
So, she went back to somewhere new, somewhere Rose had never been: Steven’s room.  
With a quick glance, she confirmed that he and Greg weren’t there anymore. They’d probably tried to follow her.  
After climbing the stairs, she crouched in front of Steven’s bedroom window, pulling his duvet over her shoulders. She needed to feel the weight of something, to have something hold her down and remind her that this wasn’t just a nightmare.  
She started sobbing again, blowing her nose in the first thing she could find, Steven's duvet.  
What she and Rose had hadn’t been unique. She felt miserable, so, so tired of being herself, being a pearl -and the duvet looked disgusting now.  
‘Your status, my purpose, none of it will matter anymore!’ she’d said, so many years ago, before things took a turn for the worst.  
Some days, sometimes, she could pretend that was true. Hell, pretending it was true was Rose’s favorite pastime.  
She had been freer that any Pearl had ever been. She’d been allowed to be a rebel, she even convinced a Diamond to rebel! But her purpose, her status, did matter. They’d kept mattering long after Rose had told her they wouldn’t.  
It mattered that she hadn’t been able to stop Steven from giving himself up to Homeworld, a decision she was sure would have led to certain death.  
It mattered that pretending to shatter her own Diamond, the Gem she loved, who she would have died for, had hurt her deeply, yet she couldn’t tell anyone.  
It mattered that Garnet and Amethyst had tried to help her to come to terms with Rose’s decision so many times, and she’d had to push them away.  
“Pearl. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.” Garnet had told her, frustrated, soon after Rose’s death. Pearl had wanted to talk to her so much about who Rose was for her, but she couldn’t.  
If she’d been any type of gem but a Pearl, that would never have happened.  
If Rose hadn’t treated her like a Pearl, if she had trusted her, that never would have happened.  
But Rose, right after Pearl had agreed to go through with something that was supposed to free them both, had tainted that freedom forever.

  
The noise of the warp-pad startled her out of her memories.  
“Dad, you really could’ve told me this earlier.” Greg and Steven were still arguing, it seemed. “Months ago!” Pearl could do nothing but keep listening, Steven’s voice was very loud.  
“I-I thought… I never asked for the details… I barely even know what a Diamond is! I thought if it was an emergency, Pearl would have told you…” Greg’s voice, by contrast, was barely audible.  
“Oh? And HOW?” Steven yelled. Pearl winced. She’d never heard him get so mad at Greg.  
“Rose only told me that she was sure Pearl would never tell the others, she didn’t tell me she’d forced her into silence!” Greg answered, shocked.  
“Oh, so there was _one_ thing she didn’t tell you, at least,” she snapped from upstairs. Greg and Steven stopped talking. ‘She did this to me, to protect her secret, and the secret hasn’t been safe for the last fourteen years anyway?’ she thought.  
She instantly regretted her outburst. Greg wasn’t the one she was angry at. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know what Diamonds could do, they’d never told him anything. It wasn’t his fault that he was a human and not a Pearl, that he could choose whether or not to keep this secret. It wasn’t his fault Pink Diamond had done this to her, that even after multiple declarations of love, she'd violated her so deeply. It wasn’t his fault that he was free and she… well, she was really free, now. She’d found a way to be.  
The only sound in the house was that of one person’s footsteps.  
“Pearl.” Greg’s voice was now coming from right above her. He was standing over her, blocking the sun that was shining through the window. She still didn’t look up from her crouched position. Then, she saw the shadow of an arm reaching towards her.  
“Don’t touch me,” she whispered. He didn’t. He took a step back. He spent several awkward seconds staring at her.  
“I’m sorry. If I’d known you wanted to tell him so much, but couldn’t, I would’ve told him. On your behalf.” Great, now he was pitying her. “What Rose did to you was terrible.”  
She scratched at her face with her nails. Once again, she felt as if her world had crumbled.  
“Well, in the end, you didn’t need my help. Steven told me what you did.” He smiled at her.  
Pearl scoffed. She didn’t know what to think. She didn’t know what to say, but that truly didn’t matter.  
She couldn’t talk about this, because Rose had never trusted her _enough_. Not as much as Greg. She couldn’t talk about this because she was a Pearl. It wasn’t fair.  
It had taken her weeks to get over the lion. She wasn’t sure she would ever recover from this.  


**Author's Note:**

> So I rewatched all episodes Greg is in and I think he knows (I am not 100% sure, but this is just a fic anyway, I’ll just tag it as an AU if it turns out I’m wrong). Pearl’s gonna have an existential crisis.  
> Poor Pearl.  
> Spoilery Edit: welp, Greg doesn't know. It's an AU now.


End file.
